ECOLOGICAL RELEASE OF AN EXOTIC SPECIES UPON SUPPRESSION OF ITS INVASIVE PREDATOR: A FIVE-YEAR CASE STUDY, WITH NOTES ON OTHER SPECIES, AND THE LIFE HISTORY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN GECKO, HEMIDACTYLUS TURCICUS

Ecological release allows a species to expand beyond its currently occupied niche upon removal of a limiting mechanism such as a predator or competitor. Unfortunately, these interactions between exotic and invasive organisms are relatively unknown. We examine how a small-scale, intensive Red Fire Ant (Solenopsis invicta) eradication program may influence the herpetological and formicid community on a 1.85 ha plot in northeast Texas. Red Fire Ant mounds were individually treated with a series of pesticides in 2005, with follow up treatments in 2006 and 2007. Populations of Red Fire Ants, other ant species, reptiles, and amphibians were monitored throughout the study. Other ant species showed signs of recovery after two years of Red Fire Ant suppression. Although reptile and amphibian diversity increased during the study, only populations of the Mediterranean Gecko (Hemidactylus turcicus) showed a dramatic response. The removal of Red Fire Ants provided this exotic Gecko with the opportunity to proliferate. The potential for these kinds of unexpected responses must be considered when removing introduced species from communities containing multiple exotic and potentially invasive organisms

Law and norm: justice administration and the human sciences in early juvenile justice in Victoria

A recurring motif in law and legal studies literature is the relations between justice and legal administration on the one hand, and the social and human sciences on the other. Judicial and non-judicial systems of knowledge and practice are viewed as separate and distinct, as in some recent critique of the ‘New Penology’ that posit fundamental tensions between justice and welfare models of penality. Alternately, theorists have ‘de-centred’ law by focusing on the way in which problems form at the intersection of both legal and extra-legal institutions. This paper reviews the literature on the close interconnectedness of ‘welfare’ and ‘justice’ models of penal policy and ways of conceiving these relations in terms of a ‘complex’ involving justice administration and the conduct of the human sciences. It then attempts to demonstrate these relations, historically, in the ‘cross-talk’ of agencies involved in establishing the children’s court and the court clinic in Victoria. Finally, the paper argues that the specific effects of law in this particular jurisdiction were to mandate the social scientific instruments needed to construct and promote the notion of a ‘normal family’. This account may have implications for contemporary juvenile justice policy and images of family in the present

Punishing welfare : genealogies of child abuse

Official statistics on child protection in Australia suggest that child abuse is at crisis levels, providing a context for the most recent legislative and regulatory changes in child protection in Victoria; these promote community-managed services, voluntary care agreements, informal legal processes and fast-tracking of child intervention. This article sets out the rudiments of a genealogical account of the category of child abuse, placing the present events in the context of historical shifts in how the problem of child abuse is conceived and acted upon. It draws attention to new forms of power in relation to the policing of children and families, and their corresponding modes of subjectification that seek to fabricate individual responsibility for the underlying social arrangements surrounding children and families

Christian political participation in the Arab world

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